Disparity In League Overall Rankings

You can't get above 81? You must have started a few days ago then... I'm a total noob, but I'm in a good league, and have been every day since day 1. I have an 86 ovr team, with pretty much all elites except my safeties, my right OT, and my special team. Grind the events, play the Long Shot event, open packs, train your players. If you've been playing enough, you're getting elites easy.

I agree with @Maiyn

If you haven't seen the Twitter feeds or online posts about it yet, understand that there is a secondary market for in-game "purchases."  For all four seasons a non-EA site has allowed for the earning/accumulating of a point value referred to as MHC that can be cashed in throughout the season for varying amounts.  Values are high at the beginning of a season and low towards the end.  But just like this forum, they would reward you for posting, helping, betting, picking, etc  Eventually when you arrive at a whole number, there were people willing to take your "1.0 Coin" and buy a Bronze Player from you in-game for 1m coins or whatever the exchange rate was at the time.  So if you were an active poster on that forum, you could accumulate dozens of these MHC and cash them in for coins in-game.  Many have now been banned for that.  Many top leagues went from 32 members to 12 or other low membership because of purchases like these.  That's also why there are caps on card categories now.  Harder to exploit coin farmers when you can only sell a gold card for 100k coins.  Earlier this year there were coins as cheap as $40 for 10m coins or 100m, I can't remember which one.  But consider the time it took you to spend $40 in-game and compare that to just paying some kid $40 for 100m coins and building a beast of a team right away.  EA is trying to figure out how to stifle and eventually stop these processes.  Hence the banning.